Multi Party Video Calling

I spent some time yesterday afternoon trying to do a group video call. We ultimately couldn't make it work and ended up on an old school conference call.

That was a disappointment to me and I am hell bent to fix it.

I know that Skype just released a new client that supports multi party group video calling. But I've heard that Skype plans to eventually charge for that feature. I don't mind paying but I don't want a service that requires an entrepreneur to pay just to talk to me.

I'm looking for a free service. We tried jabber over gtalk in the iChat client. I've heard that works. But we could not get it to work for us. I think it may have been a firewall issue.

I can toubleshoot the firewall issue if it is on my end but I don't want to be dealing with firewall issues every time I try to video with someone new.

Possibly the best thing about Skype is that I've never encountered a firewall issue with Skype.

Anyway I would love some advice on this. We've got a great video setup on the Mac mini in our conference room and I want to look at the people I'm talking to if at all possible.